Sensor activity and logic behaviour of PET based dihydroimidazonaphthalimide diester

Abstract

An ester terminated dihydroimidazonaphthalimide as multi-functional logic device is presented. Due to the optical changes as a function of pH this simple molecule is able to act as a molecular pH metre, a digital comparator and a half-adder. It was demonstrated that the dihydroimidazonaphthalimide comparator could be used as a fundamental element of an optical device for control of pH windows. Also, the ability of the device to detect metal ions in DMF and in water/DMF (3:1, v/v) at different pHs has been evaluated by monitoring the changes of its fluorescence intensity. Among the tested metal ions (Cd2+, Co2+, Cu2+, Fe3+, Ni2+, Pb2+, Zn2+, Bi3+, Hg2+ and Ag+) only Fe3+ and Bi3+ were efficiently detected. In water/DMF (3:1, v/v) XOR and XNOR logic gates are presented using pH and Fe3+ as chemical inputs based on encoding binary digits of logical conventions.